Microsoft Launches Copilot Pro: AI Assistant for Advanced Users to Enhance Office Intelligence

Microsoft has launched its AI-powered Office features for consumers just two months after initially releasing them for businesses in November. Copilot Pro is now officially available for a monthly subscription of $20, offering AI-driven features within Office applications such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, as well as priority access to the latest OpenAI models and the ability to build your own Copilot GPT.

If you are already a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscriber, the additional $20 per month (per person) subscription fee will immediately unlock Copilot in the Office applications on Mac, Windows, and iPad. These features include generating entire PowerPoint slides with chatbot-like prompts and an integrated Copilot experience in Word for paraphrasing paragraphs, generating text, and summarizing documents. Copilot will also appear in Outlook.com to assist with email replies or generating new emails, and there is a preview version available in Excel for data analysis and chart generation.

Most of the features previously offered to businesses over the past few months will now be available to consumers, with the notable exception of the ability to generate PowerPoint slide decks based on Word documents using Copilot. This feature is currently unavailable as the consumer version is not powered by Microsoft's Graph technology.

In addition to the Office integration, Copilot Pro includes access to the latest OpenAI models, improvements to the Designer (formerly known as Bing Image Creator), and the ability to build your own Copilot GPT.

If you are not a Microsoft 365 subscriber, you can subscribe to Copilot Pro separately to gain priority access to Copilot's GPT-4 Turbo. You will experience faster performance during peak times and be able to switch between models quickly. Image creation using OpenAI's DALL-E model will also be enhanced with new landscape image formats and improved image quality through Copilot Pro. The subscription service will soon include a new Copilot GPT Builder, allowing you to create a customized Copilot GPT.

Microsoft positions this new Copilot Pro subscription for its advanced Copilot users, similar to OpenAI's offering of its own ChatGPT subscription, priority access, and the latest models. Divya Kumar, Microsoft's Global Head of Search and AI Marketing, said, "There is a strong demand from these advanced users who want faster access to the latest models, faster performance, and creative tools."

These Copilot Pro features are likely to be appealing to advanced users, but you will need to subscribe to Microsoft 365 Personal or Family to access the relevant Copilot functionality. All these Copilot Pro features will be available on the web, Windows or Mac applications, and mobile devices. Just as Microsoft has continuously improved Copilot over the past year, there are more Copilot Pro features to come.

Kumar used a metaphor to describe the AI bombardment we have seen from Microsoft in recent months: "Given that we are in that mode, you can expect us to do exactly the same thing with Copilot Pro," she said. "We want to continue to bring additional advanced value, and we will start doing that very soon."

Microsoft is also opening up its Microsoft 365 Copilot service to more businesses. The service was initially launched last year for large enterprise users with a minimum requirement of 300 seats, but Microsoft is now lifting this restriction and allowing most of its commercial customers to subscribe for $30 per user per month.